Sky's baby sister was born two weeks ago prematurely. She's at the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at Prov. We went to visit the other day. Before you can go into the room, you have to put all your stuff into a locker and scrub your hands up to your elbows for two minutes. Then someone takes you in.
OK, this gets your hands clean, but what about your clothes, shoes, face, hair? What it really did was make me think about clean and dirty. Even though I'd just scrubbed up, I didn't want to touch anything. I looked at the door knob, all the surfaces, and thought, is that clean? I didn't want to hold the baby. What if I breathed bad stuff on her? What if she got infected from something on my shirt?
I did take the baby, who felt so very light, and held her while the tube of milk emptied through her nose. There was a mixup - Mom had planned to breast feed her, but for some reason this was set up. The baby doesn't have to work so hard this way I was told, but it seems so wrong for a baby to feed through a tube in her nose.
I'd left my memory card connected to the computer so no pictures. Was my camera clean enough to touch with my newly scrubbed fingers anyway?
And I'm still thinking about how dirty everything is. Making me stop and wash my hands for two minutes had a powerful effect on my awareness.
One of my guys was born a month early and spent a week in NICU. I told you about that crazy birth with J.L. who you know. Everytime I hear NICU my heart leaps and then relaxes. They have some well trained nurses and doctors there, do they not? They may see the same stuff every day but they treat each parent and baby like they are special and helped me through a difficult time.
ReplyDeleteThe funniest thing for me-- around my son's actual due date, I got sad. They'd told me to call and I did and they said that I'd not gotten sick of being pregnant and that I'd needed to go through that last month, physically. I had a good laugh over than in each pregnancy after that when I thankfully hit that point!
Sky's sister is in my good vibes!